Elena (52 page)

“Jason Findley,” I said. “Elena never denied his influence, especially over the first third of the book.”

“Would you say the first third was a collaboration?”

“No. The ideas were Elena's. But Jason guided her research initially, particularly into areas beyond literature. I think he even perceived that as his major function.”

“Would there have been a book without him?” Martha asked bluntly.

“Yes,” I told her, “but it might not have included such things as the story of Mary Rowlandson's captivity or Thomas Morton's Maypole. Jason knew thousands of such minor historical episodes, and he showered her with them.”

“What is Elena's?” Martha asked.

“Everything else,” I said. “But particularly the ideas.” I leaned over and took the book from Martha's lap, then flipped through it. “Take Dreiser, for example,” I said. “Listen to what she writes about him.” I read aloud: “‘The primary difficulty in Dreiser's vision is that his sense of fatality lacks the complexity of a profound intelligence. At times, and particularly in
Sister Carrie
, it seems little more than an overly elaborate defense of the simple-minded view of that judge in Butler's
Erewhon
, for whom luck is the only human quality worthy of veneration.'” I closed the book and looked at Martha. “Elena goes on from this to write an entire essay on the nature of fortuity in American letters.” I shook my head. “Under no circumstances could Jason Findley have done that.” I stopped for a moment, suddenly seized by a memory of Elena near the end of her long labor on
Quality
, sitting at her desk, her glasses resting on her lap as she leaned back to rub her eyes.

Martha seemed alarmed by the sudden pause in my speech, suspecting, as she must have, that it was perhaps a subtle prelude to a stoppage of the heart. “William?”

I closed my eyes slowly and rubbed them, just as I imagined Elena doing. When I opened them, Martha was halfway out of her seat, one hand extended toward me.

I smiled. “I'm fine,” I said. “I was just remembering how weary Elena sometimes looked while she was writing
Quality
, especially toward the end. And I was also thinking how very lovely that weariness was. Do you know what she said about Melville? It could be said about her, too, you know.”

“What do you mean, William?”

“She said that he had the beauty of a grave resolve. So did my sister, I think.”

Martha eased herself back into her chair. She looked rather addled, no doubt grasping the alarming fact that were I to die, a very important primary source would be snatched from her.

“Relax, Martha,” I said, adding a little wink. “I'm eighty, but I'm not going yet.”

Martha nodded quickly, unamused, then glanced out toward the small, weedy garden that rested between the house and the beach.

“When I interviewed Jason a few months ago,” she said, “he told me that he thought of Elena almost all the time.”

“That was gallant of him.”

“Do you think he was telling me the truth?”

“I have no doubt of it at all,” I said. “He loved my sister.” I lifted my hand and swept it out slightly. “This is where they had their best years, those summers in this house.” I laughed. “I remember the second one we spent here better than the rest. It was the summer of 1959. Elena was at work researching her far more expanded version of
Quality.
Jason was putting the finishing touches on his latest effort. They were very happy together that summer.”

I could remember it very well. It was the summer they planted the flower garden. We had come up toward the end of May. Alexander had come along, too. He had finished his freshman year at New York University, and he'd brought Saundra, the young woman he would soon marry, and also a young man named Roger Whitman, a fellow student at NYU. Saundra was very personable and accomplished, a music major who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist. Roger, however, dreamed of nothing whatsoever, and we were all amused by his immense indolence. It so happened that Elena was researching the twenties at that time, and I have always believed that Roger's languid manner must have fit right in with the era she was studying. Even now I think of him when, from time to time, I take down
Quality
and read a passage or two from her section on the twenties:

It was an age that encouraged the adoration of a certain kind of writer, who laughed at work and slow increase while swigging gin in dark speakeasies where papier-mâché grapevines framed wall-sized pictures of the Bay of Naples. Even a frivolous time must have its hero, and for the twenties it was the sort of character who looks for an inheritance as his salvation as surely as others look for work, who exalts money and even grovels for it, as Amory Blaine does in
This Side of Paradise
, but who sneers at the labor that earned it.

Beside this listless, supercilious creature, the characters of Sinclair Lewis burn with an almost holy flame. One finally comes to respect the plodding Dodsworth, the grasping Babbitt, and even the naive Carol Kennicott, whose sleepless reformism is as noble as it is ridiculous. At least these people acknowledge, however unintentionally, the truth that effort is a moral and a biological imperative, that growth comes only through extension, and that if this were not so, then life would not have evolved beyond the humblest glob of undirected protoplasm.

Roger Whitman was probably as close as any human could have ever been to a glob of undirected protoplasm, but even he could not spoil that summer. For a while he and Alexander lazed on the beach below the house, Alexander attempting to rouse him to the effort his sophomore year would require. Elena and Jason and I smiled to ourselves at both Roger's effete malaise and my son's evangelical relentlessness in trying to dispel it.

“I must say that I'm proud of Alexander,” Elena said on one occassion. We were busily breaking ground, readying the garden for the first planting. Elena was dressed in a cotton blouse and flannel pants rolled at the cuff. She looked, Jason said that day, like a Norman farm woman, thinner, perhaps, but with that same outdoor bloom of health.

“Proud of him?” I asked. “For what?”

“The way he's determined to turn his friend around,” Elena said. “It's admirable.”

“I can't imagine why he's taken up with that boy,” I said, shaking my head. “I think he should expend his reformist efforts on less intractable subjects, like war and poverty.”

“Speaking of war,” Jason said, without looking up from the plot of ground he was hoeing, “I brought you a copy of von Steuben's
Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops in the United States.
”

I looked up. “Me?”

“No, Elena,” Jason said. He laughed. “I can't imagine you reading von Steuben, William.” He turned back to Elena. “Also various works by Jonathan Dickinson, Freneau, and Odell. They should help you figure out the Revolutionary period.”

“Yes, good,” Elena said. She continued raking her square of ground. “It should also be a nice contrast to my notes on the twenties.” She looked up and smiled. “And then, of course, I've got to deal with
The American Experience
by Jason Findley.”

Jason covered one of his bulbs and patted the ground softly. “I prefer perennials.”

“Less work involved,” Elena said. “Don't have to replant every year.”

“Yes, but in the idea, too,” Jason said as he got to his feet. “You know, the business of something continuing to provide beauty year after year. I like the way they stand, symbolically I mean, for perseverance.”

Elena laughed. “Of course, you wouldn't want to pursue that too far, would you? Imagine the perseverance, for example, of crab grass or dandelions.” She shook her head. “That's the problem with romantic symbolism. It's not pared down, not precise.” She scowled. “It's all moonlight and magnolias.”

“Don't be so harsh, Elena,” Jason said. He slapped some of the dust from his pants. “People shouldn't expect information from a poet.”

Elena looked at him quizzically. “What, then, should they expect?”

“Sentiment,” Jason said. “It doesn't matter what the truth is. It only matters that the feeling is genuine.”

Elena frowned. “I don't believe that,” she said. “If that's true, then what's the point of thinking?”

Jason smiled. “Well, what is thinking, anyway? It's only the arrangement of sentiment, nothing more.”

Elena started to speak, but Jason lifted his hand. “There's no such thing as thought, Elena, there is only intelligent feeling.”

Elena looked at Jason as if she had just discovered an alien presence in his soul.

“I don't believe that,” she said.

Jason shrugged, picked a bulb from the seed pouch which hung from his neck, then bent down and began digging a shallow hole.

Elena continued to stand above him, looking down.

“Did you have the same attitude toward thinking when you wrote
The American Experience?
” she asked after a moment.

Jason did not look up from his planting. “Of course,” he said. “I've always had that attitude.”

Elena watched Jason as he casually went about his gardening that afternoon, walking in a squat as he planted one bulb after another up the long row we had already cleared. “Much in him remained but weakly formed,” she would later write of the poet Joseph Rodman Drake, “as if at the moment of creation, nature had withdrawn something, stubbornly withheld that which might have brought him to completion.

I have always believed that Elena wrote this passage, about a man of sadly scattered gifts, with Jason in mind, and that the process which ended in her writing it began that afternoon in the flower garden by the bay.

P
erhaps they should have had their battle that very night, sent plates and coffee cups crashing. Perhaps if Elena's “close decorum” and Jason's determined civility could have been laid aside for one instant of combat, then much of their later pain might have been averted.

I don't know what my sister might have surrendered to Jason in such a battle, or to what difficult lengths she might have gone to indulge him. But to suggest, as Martha does in her biography, that Elena would never have tempered her opinion as to the intellectual paucity of
The American Experience
is to render my sister so one-dimensional in her intellectual integrity as to strip her of her human needs. Elena loved Jason Findley more than she ever loved another man. She would not willingly have allowed a simple difference in ideas to have destroyed their relationship. Martha may portray my sister in heroic isolation, but in reality Elena did not want to end her days alone on Cape Cod, and certainly she would have preferred to spend them with Jason rather than with me.

And so Elena moved very cautiously indeed for the next year. She had read
The American Experience
years before and delayed rereading it as long as possible. Perhaps even on that day, as we were planting the garden, she already suspected that “romantic wooliness” which dominated Jason's thought, and in turn, his work. But if that were so, she kept it honorably to herself, as Manfred Owen does, “not as one who avoids an unpleasant truth, but as one who understands that the precious things of life form a tapestry rather than a hierarchy, and that of all the things we deem worthwhile, the values that contradict our love remain the most difficult to enforce.”

Still, no matter how difficult, the judgment had to be made, and by the time Elena turned fifty she had begun the long process of making it. It was still an entirely inward affair, of course. My sister made sure no hint of it emerged. As a result, when Sam threw a party for her on her fiftieth birthday, she appeared content with the life she had made for herself. But it was all a show, as she would later admit, all a pointless show.

The party was held in the afternoon. It was winter, and snow blanketed the ledges outside the arched windows of the Parnassus Press executive meeting room. Sam had asked Elena and Jason and me to come in a bit before the party started. He took us to a small room and unveiled the portrait of himself he had commissioned. It still looks down on that long oak table where Christina now presides, but it will always seem to me, in its hopeless exaggeration, uniquely Sam's.

“Well,” he said, “what do you think?”

Elena took her glasses from her purse and put them on. Then she carefully surveyed the portrait. “You look … how shall I put it … you look
in charge
, Sam.”

A huge smile swept over Sam's face. “That's exactly right, Elena, exactly right.”

Jason nodded and puffed his pipe. “Saladin himself could not have looked more regal.”

Sam's glance slid over to me. “How about you, William?”

I put my arm over his shoulder. “It bears a resemblance to its subject,” I said, patting his ample belly, “but I think the artist was more successful in taking off a few pounds than you have ever been.”

Sam nodded gravely. “I told him to do that, shave off a few pounds. In a thousand years, who'll know the difference?”

“Absolutely,” Jason said. “Washington had the artist remove his facial scars, and no one ever accused him of being a liar.”

Sam punched me lightly on the arm. “There, you see?”

And with that Sam ordered the portrait transferred to the meeting room and hung. When the task had been completed, he slapped his hands together and stepped back to admire it. For a moment he seemed almost mesmerized, his eyes locked on that other set of eyes that stared back at him. Then he wrapped his arm around Elena's waist and drew her to him. “Well, Elena, the grapes have ripened nicely on the vine, aye?” He gave her an affectionate little hug. “Come, let's join the party.”

Elena and Sam moved down the hallway, and Jason and I strolled along behind them. The walls of the corridor were decked out with photographs of the prominent authors Parnassus had either nurtured from their beginnings or lured away from other houses by treating them with more respect and even, at times, more money. It was an impressive array, for much that was worthwhile in American letters since 1934 had been published by Parnassus, and as Sam strode down the hall with Elena in tow he looked very much like one of those captains of culture he could now claim with some justice to be.